This event will be live streamed. To register please visit: http://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/focus-on-english-for-academic-purposes-edward-de-chazal-and-emma-greenhalgh-bristol-uk-tickets-8055701821?aff=eorg
Listening in EAP: Academic listener as interpreter and recorder
Edward de Chazal
Major researchers and practitioners in listening report that there is very limited research into EAP listening. In reality, listening in academic contexts can be highly varied, from formal transactional lectures through to informal interactive projects. Students may have to engage with academic listening events such as lectures which are:
cyclical: i.e. part of broader knowledge cycles in which information is researched, presented, processed, and communicated -- these cycles may include conference presentations, journal articles,lectures, seminars, online media, and textbooks
integrated: i.e. connected to other skills and tasks which can involve all four skills
multimodal: i.e. involving multiple input channels such as written text, spoken text, audio, video, visuals (including images, maps, and graphics), and links to websites
These characteristics underline the central position of listening in an academic context, and offer opportunities for EAP students to participate in a wide range of activities: students can read texts on a given topic, listen to input on that topic, and produce written and spoken work (such as presentations and seminar contributions) on the topic. This level of integration suggests that knowledge and content is introduced and processed across different skills and technologies, and major roles of the listener are to interpret and record this information.
This presentation explores the nature of academic listening, roles of the listener, and purposes in listening. Participants will undertake practical activities to clarify the major academic listening genres and identify challenges in listening, in order to formulate classroom approaches to academic listening using a variety of sources.
Laughter in English as a Lingua Franca in university seminars
Emma Greenhalgh
This seminar will disseminate recent pioneering research the presenter conducted for her MA Applied Linguistics dissertation, into the extent and function of laughter in university seminars and will discuss possible implications for EAP teaching. To date, humour research in ELF and/or EAP contexts has been a relatively underrepresented area and it may be that international students would benefit from better-informed intercultural pragmatic training in humour.
A mixed method analysis of a number of corpora was conducted utilising corpus linguistics and
conversation analysis. In order to ascertain the relative frequency of laughter episodes, an ELF
corpus (VOICE) was compared to other available corpora of university seminars from the USA
(MICASE) and UK (BASE). Furthermore, detailed conversation analysis of the data helped to shed light on how power shaped the laughter episodes in the seminars. The findings revealed that ELF seminars are laughter- rich domains and that the students are the key initiators of shared laughter episodes.
